Friday, January 14, 2005

Links That Don't

Is it me, or are people getting more and more lazy about checking whether the links that they publish (web, email or phone) actually work? Three examples:

A major national organisation that we have contact with at work has a web site about various projects that it is involved with. If you've got questions, there's a cheery Contact Us email link. If you send to that address you get an "address not known on server" non-delivery report.

An ISP advertises a new service in an email for customers. "For more details see the FAQ at..." click on the link: 404 not found. Search the web site for the subject of the email. No pages found.

An email from a major network provider with a legitimate request for information from us. If you've got any queries, ring this number, choose option x. Nope, never heard of the request for the information. Try this number. Nope, never heard of this request. What email address did it come from? Nope, not in our corporate email directiory.